2013 Will Be Great

I went to the opera a couple of weeks ago. It was my first opera experience, and I bought the tickets because they were cheap, the thing was in English (which I prefer), and because on camping trips as a kid, Lindsay and I would test out our "opera" voices in campground bathrooms. I remember that being amusing, and I thought maybe the real opera would be amusing as well. It's not like one could ever take people who sang like that seriously.

The opera, Grapes of Wrath, was three hours long and had two intermissions. It went by faster than The Hobbit, the movie. I realized at the first intermission that I was liking it - although, like isn't quite right because Steinbeck's story repeatedly smacks you in the face until you have no memory of happiness or hope, but I was certainly engaged. I was having a new kind of entertainment experience.

(The storyline is very grabbing, but I think it was the music that brought me to this next level of experience. I'm not big into musicals because the transitions between the singing and the speaking I find jarring - I get pulled out of the story. And then in movies, music oftentimes gets laid over a scene and is too obviously there in the director's attempt to manipulate my emotions. It annoys me. But when everything is sung, the music and the narrative are not separate from each other, and there are no transitions in and out of the singing. I stopped noticing it was music even while the music kept doing its heart-swelling stuff. It kept impacting me, but I had lost the detached awareness of it.)

And with that, I have felt motivated to try other new things. I've decided to only drink beer from Midwestern breweries for a while, the beer from Colorado and the pacific northwest being delicious but familiar.

There's such great new stuff to try. There's new music in 2013 by Waxahatchee, Kacey Musgraves, Youth Lagoon, Atoms for Peace, David Bowie, Joy Formidable, and that's just off the top of my head. Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing comes out in June. Doctor Who starts back up at the end of this month. There's a new Tomb Raider for Xbox!

I want to go to the theater - the Goodman and Steppenwolf; I want to go to a burlesque, Gorilla Tango. I might buy new clothes! (at least underwear because I need some)

Mitch and I are going to Sweden and Norway this year. We might run half marathons. I want to ride my bike across the USA with my parents, go to Africa to pet lions with Lindsay (show her my newly informed bathroom aria), and become an astronaut. Maybe I'll try switching genders. New stuff is great, and so, I predict, is 2013.

Tabs

Tonight, while I was sitting listening to sad bedroom rock and reading Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Mitch interrupted me by coming home toting a ticket. The second one we've gotten this month for expired tabs. Tabs, in theory, should be great. I'm used to them showing up in the mail in their important little envelope and with their helpful instructions. They're actually just brightly colored stickers - sort of like the ones you'd wear stuck to your shirt in preschool - that you affix to your license plate. Shouldn't be that bad.

Except when you don't get them in the mail because you're supposed to get something called "an emissions test", and you can't get so-called emissions test because the car won't start most of the time because it's cold and the starter's going out. And you have to wait for it to be sunny - because then it's warm enough and the car will start - to take it to the mechanic to get the starter fixed. And it's only sunny on Sundays! They're closed on Sundays. And when all this happens, you just automatically have to start paying the government money because they've found you out: you're terrible at being an adult. You're, like, a complete adult fraud!

It's obvious because you don't have the correct brightly-colored stickers.

Ghost Story

So Larry should have stopped drinking, and popping pills, and living alone. He sits – well, sat – in the cube next to mine… and, he was a pretty regular guy. Regular in the sense that he was 53 and took horrible care of himself, ate a lot of Lean Pockets – a lot of Lean Pockets – and put the minimum effort  into his work. Maybe he was a little subpar for “regular,” but I’d like to think he wasn’t too far off.

We’d have regular movie nights at his house, cardboard Lean Pocket sleeves would be everywhere. I’d ask him, “Larry, you going to get yourself a wife? Somebody to clean up all this junk?” He didn’t like that joke. He might have been gay. Kept to himself for the most part, was very private about things, even though he let me come over to his house, and all. He seemed very unhappy… so I guess he must have been.

He used to tell me, this was a while back, that in a couple of years he was going to go to Hollywood. He was going to write “screenplays”. I told him he’d be better off just getting himself a nice woman and settling down here. I mean, he has a nice job, doesn’t have to work too hard. And we got that color festival in the spring – it’s something I can always look forward to. He said “No.” He was planning on saving up for a couple of years, taking advantage of the low rent we got around here and the lack of distractions so he could focus on developing his “craft.” Crafts, in my understanding, were stuff made by old ladies.

I myself never had time to find a woman. But it’s suited me nicely, and I figure I’ll get around to it, someday. A nice lady will come into my life eventually. I go to Karaoke night from time to time; it’ll happen to it sooner or later. I’ve got time. Not in a hurry. Don’t really think about it, much.

We have windows in our cubes of a little stream outside. I’d ask Larry why he wants to go to Hollywood, a city with a lot of pollution and people. You’d miss out on the nice quiet around here, I’d tell him. And anyway, I don’t know why he needed to be a writer. Enough stuff is written already. And I was okay with watching just old movies together. He kept on insisting we see the new ones, ones that were getting awards and stuff. I don’t really need new things, but I could tell he was unhappy, and sometimes he’d get really excited and say, “Did you see how he did that? That is why I want to be a writer.” So I said it was okay if we kept watching the new stuff.

We worked in cubes next to each other for ten years. He never brought any personal stuff into the office at all, no pictures or anything, I mean. A lot of people with families would have pictures of their kids, and he didn’t have any kids. Neither do I, but I brought in old calendar photos, like of barns, and put them up on my cube walls. Shouldn’t only be family people that get to look at something makes them happy. (I look at the one from last February the most right now. Bright red peeking out from all that white snow and the trees in front of it just a bunch of black sticks.) But Larry never had anything up in there. There wasn’t really anything to clean up when he died.

I was a little happy for him when he ended up dying. He didn’t get involved with anything around here, didn’t know anybody personally, and even the two of us were barely friends. Just the two resident bachelors of the place; that’s all we had in common, really. I thought it would be a relief for him to be able to stop wanting things for himself that weren’t readily available. I felt down, then, when he kept showing up to work. It’s like his brain and his body got divorced, somehow. And even though his brain wanted to go to Hollywood for so long, and become a writer, his body just wouldn’t have any of it. None of the getting up and changing bit. I suppose his body is in the ground now, somewhere. So maybe it’s his soul that’s tied to this place. His soul that got lodged here.

I had to tell my boss, “Larry’s here.” My boss didn’t care too much. “He bothering anybody?” my boss asked. “No,” I said, “just logging orders and running reports on his computer like always.” People around here are pretty relaxed; they don’t mind Larry being a ghost. He leaves his Lean Pockets in the microwave, though, sometimes. There have been some angry post-its in the break room. My boss figures all the better if Larry’s a ghost, because he doesn’t have to pay him anymore, and training new people is always so tiresome…